In the popular television series ‘Ted Lasso’, the eponymous coach of an English Football team tells one of his players to ‘be like a goldfish’. He says it is the happiest animal on earth because it has a memory of just 10 seconds!
Well, I agree with Ted. The wise sages – dead and living – too claim that living in the present is all that matters. But how many of us can really do that?
Evolutionary psychology tells us that all humans carry a Negativity Bias. We evolved successfully over generations because we could see the danger(negatives) in every situation and avoided them successfully.
Let’s imagine two of our ancestors who go out into the woods to hunt a deer. They suddenly notice a movement in the nearby bushes. One of them says it’s a tiger and the other says it could be a harmless rabbit.
The one who said that it’s a rabbit(the optimist) might be correct 9 out of 10 times. But if he loses even once then he becomes the tiger’s meal, and his genes perish forever. On the other hand, the one who thought it was a tiger and ran away every time, survives. His skepticism made him alive and pass on his genes. And his negativity still lives through us.
Modern society is not as dangerous as it was in the stone age. But sometimes we are overcome with negativity bias while making even a minor decision, with the most common being, “What if I fail?”. One of the best responses is to be aware of this biological trait of us and tone down the stress levels a little bit.
This is not to say that we should train ourselves to become ‘be positive’ zombies, insensitive to the real world. Negativity bias does bring its own benefits. It makes us deliberative and prudent before making any knee-jerk decisions.
Thus learning to forget like a goldfish is definitely not enough and may even be dangerous! A better advice is – “Know thyself”.
Mahesh MS 